YASMINA CHATILA: EGYPT SPRING...ON MANHATTAN'S UPPER EAST
SIDE

By Alan Behr

NEW YORK, 16 JULY 2011  One of the hardest challenges for an
artist is not to let predilection or, worse, the public or, worst of all,
the critics pressure you into repeating yourself. The Egyptian Yasmine
Chatila (b. 1974, Cairo)has certainly avoided the rut of repetition in
Reveries & Delusions, her show at Edelman Arts, in New York
City. She has made such a stylistic break from her last collection of
images that it is impossible to say, this early on, if she has reached
farther in so doing; that will be the payoff if time  the most demanding
force confronting any artists reputation  proves that she was right in
moving in a new direction.

The last time around (2009), Chatila presented Stolen Moments,
a series of large black-and-white photographs in which people were caught
in private  sometimes intimate  nighttime scenes through the windows of
their New York City apartments. Chatila said she used a
telescope-equipped camera for her work; to deflect legal questions
concerning invasion of privacy, she said that Photoshop had helped mask
the subjects identities and that the results were fiction. We can
comfortably believe her. The logistical and technical limitations of
her stated working methods likely precluded any other option. (It is
not as easy as it might look to a non-photographer to find the needed
vantage points in Manhattan, and as for nocturnal photography through a
telescope at an ISO rating low enough to produce consistently acceptable
results for large-format prints: that works for astronomers but not so
often for the rest of us.)The most important thing that any young artist
can do to enhance his career these days is to call attention to himself,
and we cannot fault Chatila for doing so by precipitating a dialogue on
voyeurism, especially since the images, as a group, are powerful and
engrossing.

Reveries & Delusions more openly celebrates a
cut-and-paste technique, this time by the electronic use of forms of
collage that became a forceful presence in art from about the moment that
the young Picasso pasted newsprint onto canvas. Many of the core
photographs spliced into the images are recognizable  so much so that we
wonder if the artist obtained licenses. Unlicensed uses of images
have become big news for art lawyers: The defeat just weeks ago in federal
district court in Manhattan that the French photographer Patrick Cariou
handed to Richard Prince and the Gagosian Gallery and the settlement
earlier this year of The Associated Presss lawsuit in the same court
against the Shepard Fairey over his Obama Hope poster remind us how
restless and uncertain this area of art law has become.

Chatilas new works range across a broad range of subjects, with
varying levels of success, although irony and social and political
commentary are unifying themes. In one of the cleverest, Appetite
for Destruction, a place setting is worked into Petar Kujundzics
2010 photograph of a phalanx of women of the North Korean
military. Goose stepping with stubby, conical legs, they are armed,
shall we say, to the teeth. There is good fun in many other works, such as
Rapture, in which the image of God from the Sistine Chapel
ceiling hovers over an assembly of clerics seated along a lovely
beach.

Artists appropriate the works of others at their own legal and artistic
risk. The practical implementation of the legal risk increases with
the financial ability of the appropriated artist to sue (just ask Richard
Prince), but the artistic risk increases if the original work is so
memorable that what the artist makes of it has to struggle to compete.
Moon Party features Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow in their party
clothes and masks for Truman Capotes 1966 Black and White Ball at The
Plaza Hotel. Superimposed here is a view from space of the Earth,
giving the appearance of a fecund rising moon. Personal context will
alter perception: when we showed both images to a socialite who happened
to be passing by, she promptly replied, "The original is much more
interesting."

For Soulmate, Chatila scanned Peter Leibings photograph of
the nineteen-year-old East German border guard Conrad Schumann jumping
over the barbed wire that formed the Berlin Wall on the third day of its
existence. It is one of the great images of the Cold War  the guard
risking his life to escape from becoming his own jailer. Chatila has
surrounded the image of Schumann with a cutout of what may be a woman or
someone of the likes of Michael Jackson trying to look like a woman. The
Leibing photograph is so inherently impressive, it is hard for those of us
who know it to see Chatilas alterations as anything but an
imposition.

Perhaps the lesson here is that, with collage, it is good not to know
too much. Deconstruction is the enemy of collage, but it is an easy craft
to practice when individual components are so recognizable that a
familiarity with them distracts from the new unity made by the artist.
When you cast aside knowledge of root sources, however, the charm of many
works in Reveries & Delusions can only grow on you.

Alan Behr is co-head of the Art Law Practice at Alston &
Bird LLP. A member of the American Society of Media Photographers,
his most recent exhibition of photographs was Naked at the Ball, at Leica
Gallery in New York City.